Dreaming Sally

by James Fitzgerald

  In our last tense, terse exchanges, he muttered jibes and sarcasms; under the genteel veneer of the doctor, the sneer was revealed. I had quit my magazine job to work on the UCC book full-time, but he had no reaction when I revealed that I was about to become a published author—giving me the very nothing that had galvanized my book to life, a subject that had, at bottom, everything to do with him. To the end, he remained the slippery politician behind the press conference podium, evading the questions, hard or soft.

  Yet in the world outside the apartment of the dying father, the son kept shouldering the wheel. Many of the men formed under the shadow of the great clock tower on the hill were pouring words into my tape recorder, talking, confessing, thinking, feeling, loving, hating, searching, opening up— everything my father could not do. I was cutting open white male privilege to see what spilled out, and sometimes it turned out to be real guts. A different brand of courage. Month by month, Peter listened to me and I listened to the men. My incorrigible father was left to his deserted island and the terror of his own end. When he died on a May dawn in 1992, two days after his seventy-fifth birthday, he was alone.

  I found my father’s naval uniform and medals hanging in his closet, artifacts of the trembling hunter of Nazi U-boats, pressed by the social conformity of a peacetime world to sire children he never wanted. Jack FitzGerald, father-dead from the first, was dead at last, and the son was free to step into his own life.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Therajournalism

  A smoker since age sixteen, Dorothy Orr had led a sedentary life, constrained by a husband lashed to his own misery, and now unforgiving cancers riddled her body. For a year, George devoted himself to her daily needs, suspending his teaching job and, while Anne worked, looked after their toddler, Jordan. He anticipated the wasp stings of a chronically difficult mother, but month by month, as he sat at her bedside in the Lions Gate Hospital, the doors of reconciliation unexpectedly opened.

  Seemingly undisturbed by her impending end, Dorothy reminisced freely. Unable to quit cigarettes, she was often found sitting alone outside, smoking and coughing up spots of blood. As a son’s compassion eased old animosities, she was relieved to discover that George had evolved into a mature, accomplished man with a strong, sweet partner and a trio of wonderful children. As a child, he had loved listening to his mother’s mother, Grace, and now he was achieving something of a state of grace he never knew with the woman who gave him life.

  On a day when George visited the hospice with two-year-old Jordan, the irony deepened: running down the hall, the boy bounded into her room and yelled, “Grandma!”

  It was the only time in George’s life he saw his mother hug another human being.

  When she revealed to him that the death of Sally had broken her heart, the simple purity of the words, disastrously absent in August 1968, landed better late than never.

  On an April day in 1995, George, his brother, Mike, and their aunt Nancy gathered for the dying. When George stepped out for a coffee, his mother stopped breathing. “She was sparing your feelings,” Nancy offered.

  Following her husband, Dorothy’s body was cremated and transported back east. She was buried on the eastern divide of Mount Pleasant Cemetery, opposite Sally on the west.

  * * *

  —

  In 1996, George fulfilled an ambition from years earlier when he’d built a desk for Peter Gzowski in the basement of the CBC building: he became the host of his own television talk show. Studio B.C. was a weekly one-hour public affairs show on the Knowledge Network, a provincial educational station that pulled in forty thousand viewers. Loving the knife edge of live TV, he interviewed guests, along with a female co-host, and covered current affairs from First Nations fish farming to pot legalization to teenage violence.

  In an interview with the American poet Robert Bly, author of Iron John, George was amazed he could hold up his end of a conversation that struck close to home: the dearth of strong fathers common to the boomer generation. To become truly free and wild, Bly counselled, “boys need to steal the key from under the pillow of the sleeping mother.” Had his own mother’s dreams for him come true, George knew he would never have landed here, trading words with a poet, under the spotlight. “Where a man’s wound is,” Bly insisted, “there his genius will be.”

  In 1999, while caught up in a free-flowing interview with a guest, George heard in his earpiece the chiding voice of the female producer: “Do not deviate from the script.” Irritated by echoes of Maternal Control, he deviated and was fired. The timing worked, for together with Ross Howard, his old boss at the York student newspaper, Excalibur, he had been making a documentary on sockeye salmon, a two-year project that demanded his full energy, trekking out every weekend to a Vancouver Island hatchery to interview Indigenous people. When their film Against the Current aired on the CBC program Rough Cuts, the documentary won a Jack Webster Award for outstanding British Columbia journalism.

  * * *

  —

  Over the course of nearly three years, I tape-recorded, transcribed and edited oral history interviews with three generations of Upper Canada College old boys. To cover my working and living expenses, I burned through a $22,000 publisher’s advance and a $40,000 inheritance from my father, fitting given that the book was ultimately about the eternal drama of fathers and sons.

  I was on a deeply personal quest to find out what drives the privileged male of the species. How aware were the so-called best and brightest, the leaders of tomorrow, of the forces of family and school that had shaped their choices and actions? Did they notice? Did they care?

  Over the course of three hundred interviews, a chain of coincidental links set the organizing principle of the book: the juxtaposition of disparate yet overlapping voices arrayed across a three-generational spectrum. I chose not to interview George Orr, class of 1965; I sensed a book in his story alone, and I was content, for the moment, to let a large sleeping dog lie.

  But I did encounter a jostling gamut of characters: famous and obscure, carpenters and cabinet ministers, bullies and victims, naïfs and Machiavellians, con men and true believers, cynics and idealists, dullards and charismatics, braggarts and milquetoasts, hotshots and lowlifes, Canadian-born WASPs and immigrants, the decent and the thoughtful, the shallow and vain, the corrupt and the pure of heart, and the occasional born leader. I rattled their cages, and they rattled mine. Vulnerability was the great equalizer.

  Some were clearly in the grip of Stockholm Syndrome, fallen compliantly in love with their captors; others had become creative rebels. In every face, I recognized pieces of myself. The stubborn absence of the female-as-equal was the elephant in this room; when a former chairman of the school’s board of governors proclaimed with a straight face the school was “the best in the country,” “turning out a quality product,” not pausing to consider that admitting the brightest girls would raise the overall academic standard—not to mention deliver multiple tangible and intangible qualities beyond capitalist units of production—I waited, in vain, for him to catch on to his own absurdity.

  I was amazed when David Thomson the multi-billionaire scion of one of Canada’s the wealthiest families, agreed to an interview. Of all the voices, he showed himself one of the most intuitive, understanding that I was “trolling the collective unconscious” of a mythologized institution. He knew a Trojan horse when he saw one, but he seemed unconcerned.

  He struck me as a frustrated artist mandated to inherit the role of ruthless, bottom-line businessman in a world where legal tender ruled, where tenderness was illegal. In one telling moment among many, he confessed, “Your best friend is your dog, if you are lucky.” People wanted to know him not for who he was but for his wealth and connections, and thus he trusted no one. Within the confines of the plutocracy, only when money talked did people listen. As I left, I wanted to exclaim, For your integrity, your true self, your soul, walk away from it all. You’ve got the brains and drive—start from scratch. But I didn’t, and
neither did he.

  I thought of the air-brushed “success stories” in the glossy pages of Old Times, UCC’s alumni magazine. But if we dared to conjure the figures lingering outside of the frame, we found a different breed of archetype: the middle-aged multi-millionaire bloated with Scotch and self-betrayal, shuttling between the luxury car, the mansion and the belief in his heart that he was too far gone to change course; the alpha male CEO, justified by an impregnable sense of entitlement, tossing his wife of thirty years over the side and hauling up the shapely, gold-digging secretary; bodies hurled on subway tracks, cars careering off cliffs, heads of head boys hanging in nooses in Muskoka boathouses. I lost count of the number of brothers locked in states of uncivil war. Generation after generation, the school administrators reflexively swept under the Persian rug the toxic cycles: bullying, drugs, cheating, misogyny, racism, depression, hubris, affluenza, child abuse and neglect.

  When the book was published in October 1994, one old boy aptly dubbed it “an encyclopedia of arrogance and pain.” While it attracted some radio and newspaper coverage, no one risked unpacking the sex-and-death content, and a lesson emerged: asking questions remained out of the question. I had committed the unpardonable sin of pulling back the curtain of male vulnerability.

  That same year of 1994, Nick Duffell, an English boarding-school survivor, made a BBC documentary and published a book, The Making of Them: The British Attitude to Children and the Boarding School System. In his succinct description of the inner life of young boys exiled to boarding schools, he captured the classic double bind that shut down my own father as a boy in the 1920s:

  “Mummy and Daddy sent me away. If they loved me, why did they send me away? But I know it’s important to them and it costs a lot of money. If I show I hate it, they will be disappointed, and if they are disappointed, they won’t love me. So I won’t show them that I hate it. If I hate it, there must be something wrong with me. Maybe that’s why they sent me away.” The boy can survive only by repressing his feelings and thus betray himself.

  “The British are mad,” commented the author John le Carré. “But in the maiming of their privileged youth, they are criminally insane.”

  With the publication of Old Boys, I met the face of my father and the school, which were fused as one; I was forced to accept the impossibility of either one experiencing honest confrontation as an act of love. But if you don’t struggle to tell the truth, most of all to yourself, you grow sick; if you fail to acknowledge and experience your own fallibility and mortality—to sink down, experience it, and come back up stronger—you will skim the surfaces of life, never knowing what it means to let in and love others. I had had no clue how to love Sally or anyone else. And I was still nowhere close to prepared.

  * * *

  —

  The brave self-exposures of people in the privacy of my weekly group continued to move and inspire me, together with the many old boys who had opened themselves up to me and risked the sting of public backlash. At the same time, when Fred, a book editor friend whom I had steered into therapy, walked out of his session one evening and jumped into the path of a subway train, I learned the limits of even the best of human help.

  Over weekends and evenings, I bore down on my family history, untangling the convoluted fate of my mysterious grandfather, leading darkly down through my father to me. I was slowly learning how to live with myself—and maybe even, down the road, with someone else. But first that meant finding, or refinding, my own voice.

  Two months after the publication of Old Boys, I discovered in an archive a cache of dozens of heart-rending, painfully confessional letters written by my grandfather in a New England asylum from 1939 to 1940, the last year of his life. Parked on a dusty shelf, untouched for forty-five years, the letters had only been deposited in the archive the very week I walked in.

  A second serendipity led me to an aging doctor in a Vancouver nursing home who turned out to be the last person alive who knew the suppressed details of my grandfather’s suicide. The old man’s harrowing revelation confirmed my own decades-old intuitions. Over the years, a series of epiphanies had popped like flashbulbs, melting the generational sheets of body ice, leading me inexorably to our buried family secret. At last I understood—and could begin to forgive—my father’s silence. From terror was born liberation, and although fifteen years of work lay ahead, I had conceived a second book.

  My weekly group work continued to bring my body and soul back from the dead. On a weekend marathon, I brought up the silent-scream nightmare from my third session with Peter back in 1983; surviving shards had disturbed my sleep ever since. I could not shake the conviction, without external corroboration, that as a child of five I had actually witnessed my brother suffer the sexual predations of the live-in “help” on the third floor of our childhood Balmoral home.

  In a psychodrama reconstructing the dream, a man lay on a mat on the floor, conjuring up a memory image of my three-year-old brother. I was thrown into a state of stark terror that pitched me out of my chair; this time I uttered the scream that my throat could not claim in the dream.

  If the psychodrama had stopped there, it would have only re-traumatized me. But as my nervous system calmed down, I was able to take in the group’s sensitive, attuned responses. More than one person felt that the drama had a “devouring energy,” which resonated with my own experience. In my five-year-old mind, I was watching an act of cannibalism, and in my identification with my innocent and unprotected brother, I might as well have melded my body with his. It now all made a kind of sense.

  Over a restaurant dinner with Mike a few weeks later, I did not mention the psychodrama. But it was if he was reading my mind: for the first time, he broached the taboo of the open family secret that lived inside us like a forgotten movie. The understated sexual content of the recently published Old Boys, woven through the oral histories, had given him tacit permission to talk.

  Mike described how, night after night, a large figure softly approached his bedside. Mike had split from the experience of the molestation, ascending to the ceiling, watching himself from above like a camera. As he spoke, I felt a violent roiling, as if feeling his feelings for him, as if I was responsible for saving him but powerless, helpless, desperate beyond words. Or had I betrayed him? Did I somehow manage to kick the predator away from me, as my dreams suggested, only to deflect the abuse upon Mike?

  Together we told our mother of our conversation. She confirmed that in 1960, three years after we had moved out of the Balmoral house, she had received a phone call from the wife of the abuser; she wanted my mother to know that her husband, Hank Besselar, had been jailed for molesting small boys and that Michael had been one of his victims. Although my first impulse was to berate my mother for her failure to protect us, I decided to simply thank her for the information she had withheld all these years. The abuse was now established as historical fact, something that actually happened and was acknowledged as such. My dream was not a delusion, and even better, healing was now possible, layer upon subtle layer.

  * * *

  —

  Still, at forty-five, I remained a commitment-phobic master of hit-and-run relationships, ill-fated triangles piling up like a kindergarten orchestra, mixed with long stretches of sexless solitude. The certainty of isolation was preferable to the risk of hope.

  Old Boys sold five thousand copies, Canadian bestseller territory but not enough to pay back my advance. After the honeymoon rush of publication, I felt a mild postpartum depression. I ground out hack freelance articles at 50 cents a word, and supplemented them with a courier job, living hand-to-mouth on a negative net worth, drawing off a line of credit, barely covering the rent.

  In April 1996, my eye caught an obituary for George Wodehouse, who had died just short of his eightieth year. I chose not to attend the funeral. That fall, my parents’ closest childhood friends of nearly seventy years, Jack and Marjorie, died within weeks of each other. As we flanked Marjorie on her deathbed, I wa
s appalled by my mother’s rigid posture. On the drive home, she confessed, “I didn’t know what to say.”

  Marjorie’s daughter Janet was, like Sally, one of the few girls I knew growing up. Seeing her at her parents’ funerals, after so many years, evoked a familiar fusion of grief and the erotic. I realized I had never lost a sweet spot for her. At age six, we were abandoned to the same month-long summer camp in the Ontario wild, and I recalled her piercing, unanswered wails. I unearthed and presented a 1956 photograph of her, a blue-eyed, curly-haired cutie, perched on the steps of our rented De Grassi cottage, and she was charmed. Even though she lived three thousand miles away in British Columbia, or because she did, I stoked romantic fantasies and churned out feverish letters. Even as I knew it was no coincidence that I was spellbound by an unavailable woman named Janet, I persisted all the same. Events unfolded, yet another thwarting triangle emerged, the spell snapped and we evolved into the passionate friends we were destined to be.

  * * *

  —

  For the 1998 Odyssey reunion, our thirtieth, once again I was driving the bus. Together with Nan, living in Victoria, B.C., we started tracking down people over the months of July and August via the internet, a magical new tool that seemed expressly made for our purpose. When Nick offered his house as a venue, he cracked, “Should I build an amphitheatre in my backyard?”

  Nan and I solicited written memories of the trip and compiled a scrapbook of photos: “1968–1998: A Space-Time Odyssey.” I wrote a letter to Sally’s mother, and she responded with a handwritten note: “George and I thought Sally was a wonderful gal and we were extremely proud of her. We felt fortunate to have had her for 18 years.”